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Gleaning the True Identity of an Enigmatic Forger

Elmyr de Hory, a Hungarian-born painter known for forging works by Picasso, Modigliani and Matisse, was the subject of biographies and documentaries full of his own lies about his background. In 1976, while under investigation for art fraud, he committed suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills, leaving behind boxes of paperwork that are now yielding some truths.

Mark Forgy (pronounced FOR-ghee), a writer in suburban Minneapolis who was Mr. de Hory’s assistant and housemate on Ibiza in the 1970s, inherited the archive. He has been poring over it with Colette Loll Marvin, an art historian in Paris. They are conducting interviews and tracking down government records to update a Web site and to produce a documentary and exhibition, both titled “Elmyr de Hory: The Art and Science of Deception.”

“I’m so far down the rabbit hole,” Ms. Marvin said in a recent phone interview, “I’m just not going to rest until I find out who this man is.”

A few weeks ago, she and Mr. Forgy traveled to western France and unrolled a dozen de Hory paintings that had been discovered in a farmhouse’s attic. In Budapest, they found birth records, dated 1906, for Elemer Albert Hoffmann, son of Adolf and Iren. No one knows when Elemer upgraded his name, or how he financed art studies in Munich and Paris before moving to New York in 1947.

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Elmyr de Hory's self-portrait, from about 1970, was discovered recently in France.Credit
Colette Loll Marvin

He claimed that his father was a Roman Catholic and a diplomat, but the Budapest ledgers list Adolf as a Jewish merchant. The Nazis killed his entire family, Mr. de Hory said. But a cousin named Istvan Hont visited the artist’s villa on Ibiza, where Mr. Forgy was working at various times as a chauffeur, secretary and gardener. Mr. Hont, it turns out, was the forger’s brother.

Mr. Forgy knew that his boss copied masterpieces but did not much question their life on Ibiza, in which they kept company with celebrities like Marlene Dietrich and Ursula Andress. “I accepted the amazing with a nonchalance,” Mr. Forgy said in a recent phone interview. Mr. de Hory was the focus of Orson Welles’s 1974 documentary “F for Fake,” and Clifford Irving breathlessly titled his book “Fake! The Story of Elmyr de Hory the Greatest Art Forger of Our Time.”

After Mr. de Hory’s suicide, Mr. Forgy returned to Minnesota. “I went into deep seclusion” working as a night watchman and house restorer, he said. He held onto the papers and paintings. “I have schlepped them around endlessly,” he said. “The walls here in the house look like the Pitti Palace in Florence.”

His wife, Alice Doll, encouraged him in recent years to examine the stacks of false passports, Hungarian correspondence and Swiss arrest reports. Ms. Marvin contacted him last year. She had helped organize a show about faked and stolen art at the National Museum of Crime & Punishment in Washington, including a portrait of a pensive brunette by Mr. de Hory imitating Modigliani.

The researchers are now raising money for the documentary, developing an exhibition for the Budapest Art Fair in November and preparing to interview a nonagenarian de Hory cousin in Germany. They also plan to send paintings for lab analysis. “We’re trying to create a forensics footprint of his work,” Ms. Marvin said.

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Auctions of Soviet space relics include items like a Soyuz spacesuit.Credit
Bonhams

They already know that Mr. de Hory tore blank pages out of old books for sketching paper and bought paintings at flea markets to scrape and recycle the canvases. His fakes have become collectibles. Last fall, at a Bonhams auction in England, a buyer paid more than $700 for a seascape of crowded sailboats, with a forged Raoul Dufy signature on the front and “Elmyr” on the back.

MODERNISM IN DESIGN

H. Kirk Brown III, who runs an oil and gas exploration company based in Denver, and his wife, Jill A. Wiltse, the owner of the dog-excrement receptacles manufacturer Pet Pick-Ups, have spent three years and hundreds of thousands of dollars fostering exhibitions and documentaries about midcentury modernism.

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They are drawn to, among other design areas, British striped and floral fabrics. After World War II, that country’s consumers “were ready for something cheery, attractive, light, bright and sort of refreshing,” Mr. Brown said in a recent phone interview.

The couple have set up a foundation, Design Onscreen: The Initiative for Architecture and Design on Film, whose new 77-minute documentary, “Contemporary Days: The Designs of Lucienne and Robin Day,” chronicles a British husband and wife who died last year in their 90s. It is now making the festival rounds. Mr. Brown and Ms. Wiltse have lent textiles and porcelain dishes to a new exhibition, “Robin and Lucienne Day: Design and the Modern Interior,” at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, England.

On May 21, “British Bolts: Artists’ Fabrics of the Mid-Century, Selections From the Wiltse-Brown Collection” opens at the Florida Institute of Technology’s Ruth Funk Center for Textile Arts in Melbourne, with works by designers including Terence Conran and Lucienne Day.

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A Vostok space capsule.Credit
Sotheby’s

The Denver couple’s collecting pace has slowed lately, after a decade of acquiring through dealers like Geoffrey Rayner, Richard Chamberlain and Francesca Galloway, all in London. “It’s very hard to find a pristine piece these days.” Mr. Brown said. “Things like textiles are ephemeral.”

Some of the Days’ best works have been destroyed. In “Contemporary Days,” Christopher Wilk, the keeper of the furniture, textiles and fashion department at the Victoria and Albert Museum, analyzes 1951 chairs with hairpin legs made for the Royal Festival Hall. “Sadly and callously,” he explains in the film, “most of them were thrown away.”

SPACE HISTORY FOR SALE

After the Soviet Union collapsed, astronauts sold their artifacts to American collectors, who are now dispersing their holdings.

On Tuesday, Sotheby’s in New York will offer a dented Vostok space capsule (estimated at up to $10 million) that a brown-eared white mutt named Little Star rode into orbit in 1961. On May 5, Bonhams in New York will bring out Soyuz spacesuits ($60,000 to $150,000 each) and a 1990s Nintendo Game Boy ($1,500 to $2,000) used to play Tetris on the Mir space station.

Dr. David Sauber, a physician in New York who traveled in Russia, has consigned about 60 Soviet space relics to a June 3 sale at Heritage Auction Galleries in Dallas, including the astronaut Valentina Tereshkova’s 1963 wedding album ($5,000 to $6,000) and signed photos of the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin ($800 to $3,500 each).

Navigating the Gagarin market is especially tricky. Although he died in a 1968 plane crash, Dr. Sauber said in a recent phone interview, forgers keep “signing pictures that aren’t even 40 years old.”

A version of this article appears in print on April 8, 2011, on Page C33 of the New York edition with the headline: Gleaning the True Identity
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